All Saints Day 2014

A few years ago I participated in a wildly intensive two-week summer seminar at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., on the Book of Revelation.  Team-taught by professors in preaching, worship, storytelling, and theater, we began each day in the chapel.  Sitting in a circle, we started with Morning Prayer and then spent the next hour going around the circle and reading the entire Book of Revelation out loud.

The class immersed me in Revelation as I had not experienced before. The seminar gave me my first experience of really meeting Revelation in its wholeness, of entering into the full sweep of it.  It is a bizarre book, to be sure.  Yet, in that summer seminar I learned that it is beautiful, too – that its dizzying words and signs and symbols and visions actually work together to create something that is powerful and poetic and hopeful. 

Revelation gives us two gifts.  Its first gift to us is that it asks us to let go of the belief that we can know and understand everything about God.  The confusion it stirs can become a powerful starting place for prayer, for humility, for asking God to show us something unexpected rather than assuming we know it all.

Revelation’s second gift is that it offers us a glimpse of the kind of time that God lives in.  Although God entered fully into time in the person of Jesus, God also dwells in a kind of time that is beyond our grasp.  Time doesn’t depend on chronology.  Time cannot really be described as time as we think of it.

There’s a wonderful notion that comes to us from native peoples that helps me have a sense of what the writer of Revelation is going after.  From ancient times, Salish Indians have had a sense of what they call thin places – spaces where the veil between worlds becomes permeable, and heaven and earth meet.

Thin places exist in the physical landscape – the sea and mountains.  Thin places occur also in the turning of the year.  Today we celebrate the Feast of All Saints which has historically been one of those thin places in the wheel of the Christian year.  All Saints Day was created as a day to recognize the beloved faithful who have gone before us, and who are never far away from us.

Saints are those who are able to glimpse the wholeness that God is continually working to bring about, becoming bearers of it, pointing toward it and proclaiming it and embodying it with the prayers and actions and their entire lives.  Having “made it through the great ordeal,” as John describes in the reading from Revelation, saints are those who now see with fullness, with completeness, what our parish Mission Statement is all about.

The Feast of All Saints invites us to remember that the beloved faithful who have gone before us are still part of our Christian community.  Death does not release the saints from being in relationship with us.  All Saints Day offers us a thin place, a space in which to acknowledge the communion that abides.  This day reminds us that they, and we, belong to a God who is not bound by time.

We belong to a God for whom past and present and future intermingle and intertwine, offering doorways through which we can receive encouragement and strength so that we may work toward the world that somehow, God has already brought about in that place beyond time – a place that John describes at the end of Revelation 7:

They will hunger no more, and thirst no more; the sun will not strike them, nor any scorching heat; for the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd, and God will guide them to springs of the water of life, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.

As we move into our Leadership Day, how might we open ourselves to the God who lives both within and beyond time?  What vision or dream is God stirring in us?  How will we call upon the strength of the saints to encourage and inspire us today and everyday of our lives?

Paul A. Magnano, Pastor